This neural net had taught itself a rudimentary new skill using indirect information. It had hardly studied Portuguese-to-Spanish translation, and yet here it was, acing the job. Somewhere in the system’s guts, the authors seemed to see signs of a shared essence of words, a gist of meaning.

It's perhaps hard to grok in our daily lives, but the advancement of AI/machine learning is happening at a fast and furious pace. Count me in the camp that doesn't find this scary, but extremely exciting.